This is an event that people up in Berkeley are truly fortunate
to have the opportunity to experience. One only wishes that it was happening
around the country as well.
Filmmaker and editor Sam Pollard will be conducting a filmmaking workshop called, Behind the Scenes: The Art and Craft of Cinema, at the UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Archive
in late June.
But instead of me giving you a simple generalization of what’s going to
take place, let me instead post the entire press release because there’s
so much going on:
UC
BERKELEY ART MUSEUM & PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
Pacific
Film Archive Theater
2575
Bancroft Way, Berkeley
For
information: 510-642-1124
Tickets:
510-642-5249
facebook.com/bampfa
General
admission: $9.50 for one program, $13.50 for double bills.
BAM/PFA
members, children; UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff: $5.50/9.50.
Other
students, young people (13-17), seniors, and disabled persons $6.50/10.50.
Behind
the Scenes: The Art and Craft of Cinema with Editor Sam Pollard
Thursday,
June 27th and Saturday, June 29th
Sam Pollard is best known for his collaborations with Spike
Lee—he edited and/or produced Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Girl 6, Clockers,
Bamboozled, 4 Little Girls, When the Levees Broke, and If God is Willing and Da
Creek Don’t Rise. An early mentor, documentary filmmaker St. Clair Bourne,
helped him see that “the work that I’m supposed to do is . . . to make sure I
echo and support the stories of African-American people.” And for the last
forty years, he has been editing, producing, and directing key films about the
African American experience. Pollard’s own directorial efforts include Slavery
by Another Name and episodes of Henry Hampton’s Eyes on the Prize 11 and I’ll
Make Me A World (on which he was also co-executive producer). He has taught at New
York University since 1994.
We are pleased to welcome Pollard to the PFA Theater for
a behind-the-scenes look at the art and craft of editing, followed by a
screening of Craig Rice’s documentary Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of
Gordon Parks, a moving tribute to the great photographer and filmmaker. On June
29, he discusses his work on Spike Lee’s Clockers.
For
information on Sam Pollard’s Behind the Scenes workshop at the San Francisco
Film Society on June 28, please go to sffs.org.
Thursday
/ 6.27.13
7:00
Behind
the Scenes: Sam Pollard on Film Editing
Pollard’s editing experience began in documentary, and he
is particularly drawn to its challenges. In tonight’s Behind the Scenes
lecture, Pollard discusses his four decades as an editor using clips from both
narrative and documentary films, concluding with a Q&A with the audience.
Screening will begin at approximately 8:30 p.m.
Followed
by:
Half
Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks
Craig
Rice (U.S., 2000)
Introduction Sam Pollard
The fifteenth child of Kansas sharecroppers, Gordon Parks
became one of the key figures of the twentieth-century American art world. His
photographs, whether those of ordinary working Americans during his early
career or of celebrities and politicians from his pioneering Life magazine
work, helped define the emerging Civil Rights era, and provided essential
insights into a rarely pictured African American community. Later, his
films—ranging from the memoir The Learning Tree to his Blaxploitation epic
Shaft—helped shape a new image of African Americans. Narrated by Alfre Woodard,
this moving tribute highlights his influence, artistry, intelligence, and
grace. Jason Sanders
Written by Lou Potter. Photographed by Henry Adebonojo,
Greg Andracke, Brian Sewell. Edited by Sam Pollard. (91 mins, Color)
Total running time: c. 180 mins
Saturday/
6.29.13
8:15
Clockers
Spike
Lee (U.S., 1995)
In
Person/Sam Pollard
Mekhi Phifer delivered a career-launching debut in Spike
Lee’s vigorous adaptation of an iconic Richard Price novel, set amid the
hardscrabble world of Brooklyn projects and the schemers, dreamers, and drug
dealers that try to survive therein. Sam Pollard’s expressionist, hard-cutting
editing contributes to the film’s cri de coeur, which transforms the era’s
then-popular “hood movies” into a nearly operatic take on confinement, violence,
and urban paranoia. “Bleak, hallucinatory, and fearlessly heartfelt, Clockers
is precisely what Lee wanted it to be: ‘the hood movie to end all hood movies’”
(Village Voice). Jason Sanders
Written by Lee, Richard Price, from the novel by Price.
Photographed by Malik Hassan Sayeed. Edited by Sam Pollard. With Harvey Keitel,
John Turturro, Delroy Lindo, Mekhi Phifer. (129 mins, 35mm, From Universal
Pictures)
